Suicide Details
A few days before his death, Hasegawa had lunch with friend and American artist, John C. Goss. Jovial and witty as usual, he showed Goss photos of his latest paintings - a series depicting nude, Hindu-inspired male deities. These works would come to be exhibited at a memorial exhibition, along with a final series of starkly disembodied and erect phalluses unlike anything else Hasegawa ever created. Hasegawa's brother had cleaned out the artist's apartment and thrown out all of his works, unaware of their value, but rescued them after receiving a letter posted from Bangkok by Hasegawa asking that his works be sold at the Naruyama Gallery following his death. According to Toshie Urabe, who spoke with Hasegawa's brother, the only clues left at the scene of his death were a small piece of rope (he had asphixiated himself using rope tied around a door knob) and a small stone on which he had painted a portrait of Yukio Mishima (Hasegawa's death preceded the anniversary of Mishima's own suicide).
Read more about this topic: Sadao Hasegawa
Famous quotes containing the words suicide and/or details:
“However great a mans fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear- headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chanceso many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival.”
—Graham Greene (19041991)
“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)